Heck, I’m happy I read it for the reminder….

It’s obvious that AAA MMOG need to create a buzz and give glimpses about their crazy/new/unsuspected stuff. After all, marketing is one third of the success of a game, right? But players do not make the difference between an MMOG from a private company (like Turbine, cf comments on examiner.com) or from a publisher/with-shareholders. So should this undifferentiation be maintained by to the PR/CM? Caricature (of really bad CM): “Sorry, this feature you expected so much is quite botched because our shareholders thought it would cost too many resources for too little ROI”.

I am not sure the explosion of community-style jobs has been a good thing for the industry, because these basics don’t seem to have been learned. To my mind, there should be a marked difference between PR and CM roles. You surely have a broader view of the industry than me. How is it in practice?

And finally, OK, your post is a rant. But how do you solve the problem? Should a CM be as inconsistent and unpredictable as possible? I guess not.

Really.

Everyone is guilty of it at some point. Hell the more MMOs that I play the more I tend to expect.

I think the fact that Asheron’s Call is my favorite MMO even considering the amount of EQ, DAOC and WoW that I’ve played kinda proves it. Long live Darktide!

“I quit my TL position when I learned that the “class balance” wasn’t being done in terms of relative power, nor relative fun, but rather by relative number of players in a class.”

That was not ever the case when I was running the TL program. When it came to bugs, we often prioritized bugs in terms of how many people were being directly affected, but balance decisions were simply never made that way during my tenure.

Meeting of three people for two hours to come up with the detailed design = 6 hours
Customer meeting to review design, identify and make minor spec changes, get approval = 2 hours
QA staff member review of spec and creation of test plan = 2 hours
One solid heads down day of coding = 8 hours
Code review with QA = 1 hour (two people / 30 minute meeting)
QA staff member executes test plan = 1 hour
Bug fix time estimate (8 hour coding time x .25) = 2 hours
Demo to customer of completed subsystem = 1 hour
Project wrap up / integration / documentation of lessons learned = 1 hour

Their response “I don’t want to pay for all of that… I just want to pay for the coding!”

I am totally opposed to the idea that something sent to a person is “private” an can’t be shared openly. There are reasons for private messages, and I’m not talking about NDA type stuff… I quit my TL position when I learned that the “class balance” wasn’t being done in terms of relative power, nor relative fun, but rather by relative number of players in a class. I was told that I wasn’t allowed to share that information, but did anyway immidiately after quiting, given that it wasn’t an NDA issue, nor had I signed any NDA anyway, and I’d already quit the position.

I didn’t mind the abuse at the hands of players. My problem was the abuse at the hands of the VNboard staff who went in and deleted many of my posts. Almost everything I ever wrote as a TL was removed, including things that had nothing to do with the above incident. Bad taste? Yup.

Most of the big MMO PR plunders I can think of over the last few years come down largely to “managing customer expectations poorly.” See Cryptic’s behavior over the last year for some good examples (though their behavior does at least reflect their name well). You’d think little things like those you mention would be common sense, but in practice…apparently not.

Either way, I enjoyed your alternate approach to it.